Why I wrote "When The Last Tree Dies."

      If you add up all the camping trips, all the hikes, all the walks short and long, I’ve spent most of my life outside. Nature was always the first place I went when the indoor world became too much. The solitude shaped me. Nature was and continues to be my teacher, my healer, my spiritual companion, and most of all, a part of me as vital as all the other parts.
That is why every wound to the planet is a wound to my own body. It is especially distressing when those wounds are caused by greed, by the insatiable need for power, by the futile pursuit of yet more material goods to fill the emptiness inside.
     I know the causes of that emptiness. Some are obvious, such as expecting a thing to replace a need. Others not so much, such as the “begging for prosperity” megachurch religions that teach their congregations how to beg god for material salvation. But the largest void is caused by the move away from nature as an integral part of self, and toward the one that sees it as a commodity, something to conquer, and worse, as an enemy that brings storms, and fires, and floods.
     In the same way that other cultures are demonized in order to exploit them for political and financial gain, so is nature. The media runs continual disaster narratives on a loop of fearmongering. But it never mentions the man-made causes of those disasters. It never mentions that greed is the root cause of most of them.
     The characters in my book suffered from the effects of corporate greed. Their world was already dying from abuse before Preacher Billy’s cult drove them to the mountains. The air was toxic, the water rationed, and the food artificial. Every fire, every storm, made them fear nature more. The more they feared, the farther apart they moved away from nature as a part of themselves.
     By sending them to the mountains, I gave them a chance to reconnect with nature, to fill the void left by those with nothing in their hearts but greed and a hunger for ever more power. I created communities that were vastly different from each other. I made them good and I made them evil.
     I didn’t make it pretty. I didn’t mute what corporate profit motives, religious mind control, and programmed fear does to a human being, because those kind of afflictions aren’t fiction. They are real. They are happening as a I type this.
     But I did make them human, because that means I still have faith in our ability to wake up as a planet. It means I know I’m not the only one who believes we must speak up, we must act, we must make ourselves heard, because if we don’t we, and the planet, are doomed.
     I wanted people to understand what makes people turn to charismatic preachers, politicians, and charlatans. I wanted people to understand what makes someone hate, what makes someone kill, what makes someone dehumanize others for their own gain. And I also wanted them to understand there’s a lot of power in love and we need to draw on it far more and on hate far less.
     If we understand these things, we understand each other. If we learn to fight for peace the same as we fight for war, maybe we will have less wars and more peace. If we start standing up for our planet the same way good people stand up for any abused human being, then maybe, just maybe, we can solve the problems together.
     My book is not a manual. It’s a warning with some suggestions. But more than anything it’s a love story for my relationship with nature. I grew up in a special time when the air was still clean, when I could drink from a river, when storms were natural instead of tragic. I want this world for the children of the future, but that means we have to fight for it now, because we really are running out of time.

                                        Buy "When The Last Tree Dies"

Why I wrote "When The Last Tree Dies."

Creeping up on Sixty

In a few days I'll be sixty years old. I've never been shy about examining the inner stew that I am, but there's something about that milestone that seems to require not only a closer look, but also a categorizing of it. There's a bizarre necessity to write about it all as if it were something that can prepare others as they embark upon the same precipice, or maybe warn them that there be monsters beyond a certain age. So here's a few entertaining monsters I stumbled across in the last few months leading up to this point.

1. The past becomes endlessly more fascinating than when we lived it.

People I knew decades ago suddenly came back into my mental present time. It wasn't so much a desire to reconnect with them as it was curiousity. I wanted to know how closely or how far apart the different paths we took from the same point actually took us. So I used this internet tubes thing and googly googled a few of them. I didn't find the ones I was looking for (isn't that always the truth?), but I did stumble upon a few of them by accident while searching for something else.

For example, I found one of my old art professors while I was using an image search tool to find someone else's work. It was a brain cramp moment when I saw the similarities that probably neither of them would see because it's their art, after all, but I could see because I was the outside observer to both of them. So of course I wrote him an email and said hello.

The next one was even more bizarre. A friend who was going to visit the Los Angeles area wanted to find a Vegan restaurant to eat at while she was there. I offered to be the friendly neighborhood googler and come up with the perfect place. I found it, a few blocks from where her conference was going to be held and as I was reading the website, a very distinctive name leaped out at me. I had exactly three friends in High School and she was one of them. We weren't blood friends or even the kind of friends who swore to name each other's first born after them. But I was grateful to her, for the memory of her because I could say for the rest of my life that I knew three people in High School who didn't suck. That was worth at least an email.

2. Change is not always inevitable.

I also reconnected with a goodly amount of ghosts from the past who seemed happy to hear from me. We exchanged a few emails and then let the silence between us grow again as the same reasons we did so in the first place were still there.

The most disturbing in a holy calcification batman sort of way was someone I really admired when I was in my twenties. He was an amazing writer who seemed to have such a phenomenal and perceptive way of looking at and writing about life. He was easy to find as he had self-published enough books, pamphlets, treatises, and manuals to level a fairly large forest.

But in all that copious amount of self-flagellation there was barely anything new that reflected decades of life. He was writing about the same things, in the same language, with the same passion as he did forty years ago. It was as if nothing of life had touched him in any way. He was literally the same man he was then. I was sad for him.

And I knew I could write whatever I wanted to about him because  he would never read this blog.  He has a disdain for the internet, for the social aspect of it. He said it distracted him from real life and he only used it to take orders for his books and answer book related emails. It explained the time warp that claimed his soul in the late 70's and never gave it back.

But the saddest for me were some of the women. They're the kind of women who always bring me a sense of deep sorrow when I read their obituaries, the women who lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. The obituaries are always filled with the children they birthed, the gardens they grew, the things they did for others. And how they never left home, neither physically or metaphorically.

But for a few short years when we were in college together, they had dreams we shared over wine, weed, and eternal blooming hope. These same women were going to travel the world, they were going to write the great novel, paint the masterpiece, find the cure for cancer, become the first woman President. Instead, their obituaries will say they lived and died a few miles from where they were born, and will describe the children they birthed, the gardens they grew, the things they did for others. I wanted to ask them why they gave up so easily but I knew they would never see themselves as having given up so there was no point in asking, no point in trying to recreate a past that died the day they graduated and took the path right in front of them instead of venturing out a bit to see what else was out there.

In the end, all the searching and googling and writing ended up with the same result: the good people were still good, the bad people were still bad, the boring were still boring, and the interesting ones had all disappeared into a world where they couldn't be found so they could go on being interesting without others expectations of what interesting was supposed to mean.

3. Expectations are like assholes, no matter how much we deny it.

The most surprising thing I discovered was that some of the people I connected with had expectations I'd be a certain this or that and were disappointed that I went my own way. They weren't interested in what I had done with my life, in the new paths I had carved through resistant wildnernesses, in the way I had managed to live a life of honor, ethics, integrity and love, and still survive on my own terms, by my own wits, and with no one telling me what to do but me.

Yes, I'm surprised that I make my living with art created digitally with cameras, computers, and scanned hand-drawn and created images. Yes, I'm surprised that I make my living writing about what I do, that I've channeled my passion for words into something that gives me pleasure, that allows me to share some of what I believe and most of who I am with people all over the world. Yes, I'm surprised that I've sold things with my art in just about every country in the world, all the provinces in Canada, and every state in America. Yes, I'm surprised that I've written to and shared dreams, philosophies, world views, visions, hopes, despairs, sadness, joy, sorrow, and love with people all over the world.

So I'm surprised when people I connected with again always said they thought I'd be a writer or an artist or an activist, but they never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing. It makes me wonder why they expected me to limit myself to one thing when there were so many options. It makes me sad that they see me as unusual and different and an exception to how they thought I should live.

I want to say to them that all I really wanted was to make a difference. I didn't want to go through life without leaving my mark on it. I figured with so many options available to me that I had no choice but to exercise them all if I was truly going to make a difference by having lived. So far, I think I'm accomplishing what I set out to do.

4. Some wounds don't heal.

Of course there are people I think about, people I loved, people I trusted, people I let into my life too easily and by the time I noticed they were bad people it was too late to shut the door. They are me as much as any of my art or my words or my actions. But the deep wounds don't heal. I can still feel sad, angry, upset, afraid when I remember them. I can let myself love them even after they hurt me. But there are some paths you can't walk backwards on and the path of wounds is one of them. I leave them alone, let them remain as lessons, as reminders that no matter how many good and decent people you know in life and call friend, the biggest assholes will always be the ones whom you loved the most. Age and time doesn't seem to even that out any. I hoped it would, but it seems some wounds are timeless and are meant to be with us in that shape and form for life. Maybe in the next decade I'll figure that one out to where I can explain it better.

Winter Pond by northwest_photograph
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Creeping up on Sixty

The Flowering Self

"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality." -Nikos Kazantzakis

One of the most life changing lessons for human beings is the realization that everything in life is a choice. From the moment we get out of bed in the morning, we choose who we will be, who we will present ourselves as to the world. We put on our clothes as costumes, as disguises, as props for what we want to convey and then we step out on the stage and perform to audiences of individuals all doing the same thing.

There's an absurdity in this behavior, an unconscious mocking of ourselves for playing along with a game that gets refined by whatever hands are currently pulling the strings. But the thing is, we give our puppetmasters the strings to control us with. It's our script they're using to control us. It's our fears, our biases, our intolerance, our judgments that create the strings for others to use on us. As a result everything we are is a costume someone else has dressed us in so we can perform in their version of reality.

The tragedy is that we aren't born this way. We came into the world as optimists, as believers in the theory of all possibilities that could be picked up, tasted and swallowed. The world revolved around our own vision of things. It took shape according to what we wanted from it, what we perceived as our place in its universe.

But somewhere along the way, the shaping of group consciousness took place and the individual self was subdued and steadily beaten down by tools such as religion, school, and that scourge of all decent humanity--consensus. We were no longer free to stick things in our mouth and taste at will.

If we tried to stray from the path set out for us, we were reminded of the perils in doing so because there were no good ways to say individual. Instead such people were described as anti-social, not team players, fringe dwellers, and lone nuts.

And yet we worshipped the cult of the individual, especially the rugged variety. It was a mythical cult that was and is still written about with awe, with wonder, with the sanctity of breath reserved for wondrous things and unattainable desires. It's like heaven and the old saying that everyone wants to go to there, but no one wants to die to get there.

We grew up worshipping the individual but feared him or her at the same time, and it's easy to understand way. Think of a herd contained within a wild pasture. See the comfort of knowing all the animals are in place. Visualize the ease of drawing a pen around them all in one flawless slash of movement.

Then imagine that one little sheep, that one individual little creature who never stepped outside the "taste as you go" school of life, but instead kept stopping, kept rewriting the plot to reflect changing consciousness, different realities, new ways of looking at the world. This little sheep became the source of all fear just for getting up in the morning and being his or her own sheep.

It is why churches came along and put controls on sex and love, two states that no amount of self-righteous pontificating can interrupt once they are set in motion. There's more rules for controlling those two behaviors than any other. But it is wasted effort, a moral version of beating one's head continually against a wall in the hope that the wall will collapse before the head does.

It is why forests and all wild nature was either destroyed or put under control of some entity that wanted to either exploit it or preserve it by keeping anything but sanctioned and approved individuals from it.

The control freaks saw that Nature was far more powerful than humans, far more powerful than any deity. They saw it had the ability to capture, to hold in its grasp and transform the ordinary in us to the extraordinary that goes beyond self. Once that metamorphosis took place, they knew control was a lost cause.

It is also why any kind of substance that allowed mental escape was controlled and either outlawed or puritanically dispensed at high cost. Drugs were designed to put people in a state where there was no disturbing reality, no too obvious change from one mood, one truth to the next. Variation of mood, of being, of relating was seen as wrong. Stability of existence was seen as a positive instead of the most spirit killing weapon ever devised--other than religion.

And it was especially why hate and division was always promoted over love and tolerance. Like those penned up sheep, humans wer easier to control if they were all hungry, tired, horny, and ready to be eaten at the same time. It was far easier to pipe canned entertainment into the pen than it was to hand the stage over and invite something new to emerge from the chaos.

But within that stew of overly simmered sameness, there was always the sheep that strayed outside the herd, the one that was a bit odd, who preferred the taste of flowers instead of grass, who gazed at the sky and saw clouds and birds and tall mountains instead of some scolding, foul-tempered deity.

That was the one I wanted in my life. That was the one I wanted teaching me. That was the ones I wanted to love and call friend because he and she were what gave meaning to my life. But more than anything, I also wanted to be that for them as well because without the circle that leads us back to each other, we don't really exist as authentic, empathic human beings.

Inner Peace by sun_signs
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The Flowering Self

Imperfect Humans and the cleansing of memory

The end of one year and the beginning of another seems to set ghosts dancing on the edge of my days until I acknowledge them in some way. I usually pacify them by writing a poem, making some art, or just sitting with a glass of wine and remembering what they brought to my life, what would be lacking without their transit through my reality, and how they left the dust of some of themselves on me in some way.

Today the ghost took the shape of a man I met many years ago. I was at a very disillusioned point in time. I'd just survived a serious illness and wasn't sure I wanted to get my hopes up and believe I was going to live. I was like a rock in the river that the water washes over in degrees of cold, heat, purity, and sediment-stuffed surprise attacks. He was the ultimate cynic and of course I had to check out what made him this way because he seemed to come by it so naturally it was almost a gift.

There's an old joke that the most dangerous words a woman can say are "I can save this man." But in his sense of salvation it was less the man himself I wanted to save, than it was I wanted to understand what he represented. I thought if I could understand the depths of the system that made him who he was, I could learn something previously unexplored about the nature of war and use it for peace in that roundabout way of believing if you know the enemy, you can defeat it on its own battlefield.

For us the battlefield was mental. He was arrogant, opinionated, highly intelligent in that raw, forced disciplined way of being intelligent that comes from systemic discipline rather than desire to know and understand. He spent much of his life as a piece of machinery in a country that didn't value him as a human being beyond what he could contribute as a functioning piece of working asset.

That made him shit to relate to in any way but intellectually, and in that he excelled. His mind was a mysterious path that I jumped in eagerly to explore. I wanted to know what made him so cold to those he professed to love with a passion found only in the pages of his favorite literature, and I realized it was because he never learned to value human beings. He grew up knowing he could be easily replaced at any time, that he had no value beyond what he could provide in the moment, and that if he wanted to succeed in maintaining a relative and safe anonymity, it was best not to dwell too long in the emotional realm because that was the path to danger.

Of course this was unacceptable to me. I was and am the ultimate romantic when it comes to people's mental playgrounds. I know there's something special hidden inside everyone and I dig and dig until I get a glimpse of it. Sometimes that's enough for me, and at other times it is the hand that reaches out and drags me down the rabbit hole.

He was the biggest rabbit hole I ever fell into and it was a trip that while I have no desire to ever repeat again, I wouldn't trade for anything because it gave me an understanding of what war, what meanness, what lack of respect for a humanity creates in a population.

I'm a stubborn woman and because I believe in people's essential goodness, I was able to relate to him in a way that satisfied me at the time. I stuck to the path that we shared: literature, cultural music, and nature. I didn't want to look too deeply inside the part of him that was cruel and callous, that could profess friendship and then cut your heart the next day for his own amusement.

He was the little Prince of every mother who thinks her son is the chosen one, and the nightmare of every woman who tried to relate to him on an emotional level. I watched him go through relationships as if they were disposable jars he could stuff with his dreams and then throw away when they became too ordinary.

I think if anything defined him, other than being a train wreck son of a flawed human system, it was that he feared the ordinary. As he was growing up, the sensitive child he must have been at some time was brutally smacked down and he learned to adapt and mimic the ordinary mediocrity of existence. He didn't stand out. He didn't draw attention to himself. He merely existed.

But within that existence there was a lovely and nurturing escape: books. It was our deepest connection to each other, this eternal appreciation of books as lifesaving devices. I always carried a book around with me as a child. It was my foil against the shyness that haunted me most of my young life, the fear of interacting with strangers, the terror that someone would hurt me or tease me or try and destroy me. For him, it was the small glimmer of hope that maybe one day life would resemble something close to what he read about rather than what he was forced to live on a day to day basis.

But for both of us, the books that saved us also spoiled the ordinary for us. We could never settle for anything that was tedious, mediocre, boring. Life had to imitate art or it was neither life nor art.

I eventually couldn't handle how he treated women, the callousness in which he broke their hearts and walked away without a second glance when they stopped being princesses in magical kingdoms needing rescuing, and instead became ordinary women. I could understand it, but I couldn't condone it. So I walked away. It broke my heart in a way I never expected it to, but to stay would have damaged my honor, my integrity, my sense the world as a beautiful place.

Even after all these years he remains in my thoughts and for him, for all the potential that I hoped he would one day realize, I made something beautiful for him, something to contemplate, something to say thank you for the first lessons on what it meant to point a camera at something and have it return back at least a small piece of what the eyes and heart saw and created together.

Gandhi Quotations by orsobear
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Imperfect Humans and the cleansing of memory

Atheists, Pagans and my version of Christmas

I'm an Atheist. Always have been and always will be. But within that lack of anything specific to blame for things I screw up on my own, there is a deep and undying respect for Nature. This is not something as small as spirituality. It is a totality of connection with everything that we are, and that includes the wind, the fire, the earth, the water and our common breath that inhales and exhales each other.

I choose to honor the longest day of the year because we all need a place to start to say it's now a new year and therefore my life must make some adjustments to honor the natural path of change. Each year on this day I look at what I want from the coming year and plant virtual seeds for each wish so I have something to feed and water and look forward to blossoming in the coming year.

I also plant a wish for the world in general and humanity in specific. For this year's wish I will leave you with the words of one of my early heroes, Kurt Vonnegut: "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind. ”

Atheists, Pagans and my version of Christmas

Happy Solstice!

Happy Solstice!

Three Steps Toward World Peace

I went for a walk today in Whatcom Falls Park, a beautiful piece of green heaven here in the Pacific Northwest. It was one of those perfect late summer days of sun, a slight breeze, and temps in low 70's. The park has some old, majestic trees and I went to photograph them to make some more calendars. It was quiet with just the sound of leaves, wind, and the many hidden things that scurry around just below our clear level of hearing.

It was such a calm and peaceful environment to be in when in so many other places the world is in a crazy turmoil of mean-spirited, warmongering hatred that never seems to end. I wanted to bottle the peace and pass it around. I wanted to say "Here! Inhale this and go be nice to each other." I wanted to spread it all around and let people know what it felt like so they would stop being so mean and so cruel.

But peace, like love, like friendship, like anything requiring a relationship between self and the outside world, depends on more than one person. I can want peace and most of the time I'm lucky to be able to find it in some form or other within a few minutes of the desire making itself known. Others who are trapped in abusive relationships, high stress situations, and war zones can't have it no matter how strong the desire. But all of us can drop a few seeds here and there that might turn into peace. Here are a few suggestions to help them grow:

1. I put this one first because it is the most important: LEARN TO THINK FOR YOURSELF. Those who let others do their thinking for them find themselves trapped in situations they never thought would turn into a trap. If you learn to question what others throw at you as absolute truth than you are less likely to get suckered into something you don't want. This applies equally to love, religion, and war. We all have the "I can be fooled if I want to gene" and it's time to knock that little creep back into the shithole where he/she/it belongs.

Those who don't question and who feel insecure about themselves can be tricked into supporting a war based on lies. They can be tricked into believing there's such a thing as compassionate conservatism. They can be tricked into believing that wrapping oneself in the flag and screaming loudly for someone's blood is Patriotism, and not ignorant and stupid bloodlust based on bigotry. Timeline that led to War

2. The second most important thing is to BE KIND. We've become a mean culture. All you have to do is look at the movies we watch, the books we read, the politicians we elect and you will see how empty our spirits have become. I often find myself shouting to the wind Kurt Vonnegut's immortal words: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Commit a random act of kindness today. It doesn't require very much to think of something. You can drop a bag of groceries off at the food bank. You can mow an elderly neighbor's lawn. You can spend time with people in a nursing home. You can bake cookies for someone who is sad. You can cook dinner for someone who is tired. You can save a dog or cat from your local shelter. You can feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and shelter the homeless. You can say thank you to strangers on the other end of the phone who helped you. You can let someone cut in front of you in traffic, in line at the supermarket. You can smile at a lonely person. You can hug the unhuggable. You can give the smallest gift and have it grow into the largest gesture of kindness, caring and compassion.

3. BE YOURSELF! Most of the problems in the world are caused by those who can't accept who they are because it doesn't fit the advertising propaganda we're assaulted with on a daily basis. Those who are different, outside the norm, geeks, nerds, shy, weird, untameable, and just too damn smart for this planet are the ones who have the biggest hearts. But only you can spread the word, so get out there and quit apologizing for being real in a world that has been totally screwed up by fake, cruel and insincere people.

Three Steps Toward World Peace